How modern scenarios require a cloud-native approach to run scalable, dynamic and easily manageable applications
By Andrea Margheritini, Infrastructure Programmability & Automation Team Leader
The Cloud-Native Era
Ours is an era that finds its deepest meaning in the word “time”.
It is a running age, characterized by rapid changes, by the famous “for yesterday” demands, marked by transformations that sometimes take us by surprise or worse still unprepared. Transformations with a snowball effect, in which one inevitably drags immediately behind the other, and so pervasive that they cannot stop at the technological aspect alone, but irreversibly change our society.
It is in this changing and complex scenario that the IT sector, and all those who gravitate around it, finds itself playing an increasingly leading role in the process of socio-economic transformation. Dealing with technical decisions becomes an organizational issue of effectiveness and efficiency on the business. It is therefore important to have at one’s side a trusted partner who can accompany the most complex choices thanks to its expertise and knowledge of the reality in which we live.
VEM’s approach to the cloud world is to develop its own clear and mature identity, capable of driving the digital transformation and evolution of its partners, in a bidirectional and open path with each of them.
The mission is to provide the vision and expertise to guide and support our partner organizations in building and running scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds, where the primitive and fundamental building blocks are elements such as containers, service mesh, microservices, immutable and software defined infrastructure, declarative APIs and security.
These tools will offer the possibility of introducing applications and services that are increasingly resilient, easily manageable and observable, overcoming current technical organizational limitations unable to adequately support modern processes that, as anticipated in the first lines, find their greatest challenge in their own timeliness.
Indeed, the main goal of cloud-native applications is to be scalable, resilient, and easily manageable in a way that is absolutely agnostic to the physical or virtual location from which they run.
For VEM’s distinctive strategy, the word cloud-native is embodied in the following constituent and enabling elements:
– Microservice architectures: applications are decomposed into autonomous services, each with its own lifecycle, that can be developed, deployed and scaled independently. This promotes flexibility, modularity and ease of application maintenance.
– Containerization: applications are packaged in isolated containers that include everything they need to run, such as code, dependencies and configurations. The use of containers simplifies the deployment, scaling and management of native cloud applications, as well as the security with which they run
– Container orchestration: an orchestrator, such as Kubernetes, is used to manage and coordinate the execution of containers within a cloud environment. Orchestration automates the deployment, scaling, and management of applications distributed across multiple nodes.
– Automation and DevOps: Automation is a key aspect in the cloud-native approach, as is the simplification of application deployment and management, promoting collaboration between developers and IT operators (DevOps).
– Elasticity and scalability: native cloud applications are designed to scale horizontally, to efficiently handle peak loads and increase or decrease computing capacity as needed. Elasticity enables optimal use of where and how to use resources, whether in the cloud or within our organizations, ensuring reliable performance and fast response times.
Given these elements, VEM has built a strategic partnership with RedHat as they share the same vision of a future where a hybrid, open and collaborative model truly enables organizations to make and complete that quantum leap they need and are looking for.
RedHat’s kubernetes orchestration platform, called Openshift, is not just a product, but an open scenario, built by the community and RedHat to give concreteness to the cloud-native dimension with a hybrid approach and aimed at breaking down silos thanks to the ‘structural adoption of the most effective and efficient logics introduced by the DevOps methodology.
In this framework, the physical dimension of one’s server farm must necessarily merge with that of hyper scalers to create a single software-defined infrastructure capable of ensuring integrated and flexible decision making.
With RedHat Openshift we can finally make available to our customers all the benefits and advantages that a cloud-native approach is capable of bringing, ensuring, on the one hand, a great ease of infrastructure management in operation, whether in the cloud or on-premises, and on the other hand, the adoption of DevOps techniques to software writing, such as the use of a CI/CD pipeline approach.
Moreover, thanks to RedHat Openshift we will be able to be protagonists and makers of our own choices, because OpenShift was born as an infrastructural solution capable of transcending physical spaces and because, since it is an open product, it is possible to contribute directly to the development of an increasingly modern and up-to-date vision. As a corollary, the RedHat Ansible Automation platform proved to be the most appropriate in terms of adapting to external needs, allowing new IT infrastructures to mold themselves around those of our customers, and not vice versa.
In this way both VEM and RedHat approach is complete, since VEM is a partner capable of factoring in the necessary skills that cross all the complexities of the entire IT value chain.
A strategic vision of VEM that will also feature the structural adoption of a substantial dose of automation, not only natively included in all identified products and solutions, but also produced directly by VEM, thanks to a team of people with cross-functional skills capable of tailoring technology.
In conclusion, if indeed ours is a timeless age, our goal is precisely to re-gain it, returning to valuing the individual human being as the only one capable of conceiving and creating new worlds and possibilities.
